ZTE to bring a Firefox OS smartphone to Europe this year

Administrator

12:52, January 11, 2013

ZTE and Mozilla are on track to reveal a collaboration effort that would be debuting in Brazil and later come to Europe. The two companies are working to bring the first Firefox OS-powered smartphone and are in talks with an unknown European carrier.

The information comes directly from Cheng Lixin, Chief Executive Officer of ZTE USA. He also shared that ZTE could unveil a Firefox OS smartphone in the US, depending on the demand and interest. “If that is ready and if consumer studies support that data, then we may launch one in U.S. also this year.”, he said.

Jay Sullivan, Vice President of products at Mozilla, shared that the software company is working with China-based manufacturer TCL (which owns the Alcatel One Touch brand), ZTE and Qualcomm on making devices with Firefox OS. Chairman of TCL, Tomson Li Dongsheng confirmed that the company is in business with Mozilla. These reports align with what we previously heard.

Firefox OS will first launch entry-level smartphones with the intent on tackling the dominance of Android in that market. We've already seen promising early shots of the OS and its app Marketplace. We even managed to do a hands-on, complete with video back at MWC 2012, but we are still curious to see how the actual Firefox OS smartphones turn out.